Student health insurance programs at collegiate institutions: a national survey

Increasing health care costs are forcing collegiate institutions to find more economical ways to meet the health care needs of students. Student health insurance programs are a major component in meeting these needs. This national survey reports the extent to which student health insurance programs are offered or administered by 2-year and 4-year colleges, universities, and professional and graduate schools in both the public and private sectors. The study finds that most programs are optional, open to all registered students regardless of age or credit load, with dependent coverage options usually available. Reported enrollment levels suggest that less than 20% of the students participate at a majority of the institutions surveyed. Concern about group health insurance at the collegiate level reflects national concern over the large number of Americans who currently lack health coverage.     

Reflecting emotions: The movement-mirroring test

This study tests the ability to mirror emotions by having second-year social work students and first-and second-year dance therapy students duplicate a videotape of a person expressing sadness, anger, and happiness. The ability to mirror is then compared to imaginative, expressive, and observational skills. Movement mirroring was found to correlate positively with, and was predictive of, observational skills. Mirroring was found not to be related to expressivity and the relationship between mirroring and imagination was unclear. Dance therapy students performed significantly better than social work students on the Movement-Mirroring Test, however, training did not improve their scores.     

Different strategies for managing the work non-work interface: a test for unique pathways to work outcomes

Scientific evidence linking employers' efforts to help workers to manage the work non-work interface to actual outcomes at work remains scarce. In this study of 200 women employed in a Canadian school district, a research model was devised to explain how two strategies for managing the interface may affect stress symptoms, absenteeism and turnover intention. Several features distinguish this model from earlier models of the work non-work interface. That is, two directions of work non-work conflict, a mediator between the strategies and work outcomes, are specified, each strategy is set to relate directly to only one direction of conflict, and each direction is set to relate directly to stress symptoms and either absenteeism or turnover intention. LISREL analysis supported the superiority of the research model to a general model incorporating more common conceptualizations of the work non-work interface.     

Choosing race: Multiracial ancestry and identification

Social scientists have become increasingly interested in the racial identification choices of multiracial individuals, partly as a result of the federal government’s new “check all that apply” method of racial identification. However, the majority of work to date has narrowly defined the population of multiracial individuals as the “biracial” children of single-race parents. In this article, we use the open-ended ancestry questions on the 1990 and 2000 5% samples of the US Census to identify a multiracial population that is potentially broader in its understanding of multiraciality. Relative to other studies, we find stronger historical continuity in the patterns of hypodescent and hyperdescent for part-black and part-American Indian ancestry individuals respectively, while we find that multiple-race identification is the modal category for those of part-Asian ancestry. We interpret this as evidence of a new, more flexible classification regime for groups rooted in more recent immigration. Our results suggest that future work on multiracial identification must pay closer attention to the varied histories of specific multiracial ancestry groups.     

Producing ratio measures of effect with quantitative microbial risk assessment

Estimating the risk of infections or other outcomes incident to pathogen exposure is a primary goal of quantitative microbial risk assessment (QMRA). Such estimates are useful to predict population-level risks, to evaluate exposures based on normative or tolerable risk guidelines, and to interpret the likely public health relevance of microbial measurements in environmental media. To evaluate alternative control measures (interventions), ratio estimates of effect (e.g., odds and risk ratios) are needed that are more broadly interpretable in the health sciences and consistent with convention in epidemiology. In this paper, we propose a general method for estimating widely used ratio measures of effect derived from stochastic QMRA approaches, including the generation of appropriate confidence intervals. Such QMRA-derived ratios can be used as a basis for evaluating interventions via hypothesis testing and for inclusion in systematic reviews and meta-analyses in a form consistent with risk estimation approaches commonly used in epidemiology.     

Infant motor development predicts the dynamics of movement during sleep

The characteristics of infant sleep change over the first year. Generally, infants wake and move less at night as they grow older. However, acquisition of new motor skills leads to temporary increases in night waking and movement at night. Indeed, sleep-dependent movement at night is important for sensorimotor development. Nevertheless, little is known about how movement during sleep changes as infants accrue locomotor experience. The current study investigated whether infant sleep and movement during sleep were predicted by infants' walking experience. Seventy-eight infants wore an actigraph to measure physical activity during sleep. Parents reported when their infants first walked across a room >10 feet without stopping or falling. Infants in the midst of walking skill acquisition had worse sleep than an age-group estimate. Infants with more walk experience had more temporally sporadic movement during sleep and a steeper hourly increase in physical activity over the course of the night. Ongoing motor skill consolidation changes the characteristics of movement during sleep and may alter sleep state-dependent memory consolidation. We propose a model whereby changes in gross motor activity during night sleep reflect movement-dependent consolidation.